


The Craftsman

by HeadmasterFelicis



Series: The Telesterion [2]
Category: Original Work, The Scribe of Delphi
Genre: Magical Inheritance, Male Character of Color, Marijuana, Original Character(s), Prologue, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:42:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28180038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeadmasterFelicis/pseuds/HeadmasterFelicis
Summary: Confronting his own mortality has left more than just physical scars for 21-year-old Kal. After months of battling with grief and awakening to a magical force he doesn't understand and never asked for, Kal has left everything behind to start a new life in his ancestral home. Shortly before arriving, he and the magical force have a conversation.
Series: The Telesterion [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2064384





	The Craftsman

He had refused to talk about it the whole drive so far, but now that they were swiftly closing in on their destination, Kal was ready for the briefing. The lighter in the center console clicked and Kal took it, igniting the clove cigarette he had hanging from his lips. He shot Delphyne a sideways glance and adjusted his hands on the leather steering wheel, dropping the right into the 5 o’clock position and using the left to mind the clove.

“So, I kind of know what this place is like, right? It’s what you were showing me when we met?” Over a month ago now, but the combination of grief and drug use had scrubbed away a lot of that time.

Delphyne turned and tilted her head slightly. Her voice was soft and calm now, had been since Kal began on the path towards the house. “Sort of. It was somewhat metaphysical, somewhat drawn from the past, and somewhat from the future. But it tends to be a fairly stable place and you’ll recognize it easily.”

“What’s different? Or, hm.” Kal paused to take a drag off his cigarette and reformulate his question. “What do I need to be prepared for?”

Delphyne was silent, but the bond between them allowed Kal comfort in the quiet. He knew she was thinking, formulating, actually cooperating in trying to give him a good answer for once.

“The house needs a lot of repair,” she started with, gazing out the window at the endless stretch of trees along the dreary, barren highway. “Not much of it is habitable at the moment. Enough that you’ll be able to get by but it’s going to take some work to be any modern standard of comfortable.”

“Like, handyman shit?” Another drag. “Yeah, okay, sounds kinda fun, especially without Aunt Dev around to get on my case about it.”

Aware of how eerie her appearance became when she smiled, she kept facing the window through her reaction to how smoothly this was going. “You’re a scorpio ascendant, and we love that about you, but that’s had it’s time for the moment. The house will call on you to rely on your deeper capricorn.”

Always riddles, but Kal was fluent in them. Even before Delphyne came along, Kal compensated for his lack of innate magic with extensive study. His family could do magic, but at least he could speak it.

“Capricorn. So, more than some basic gutter repair and drain snaking, then?”

“So much more. But, again, it’s habitable. Your basic needs can be met with minimal effort, if that’s the road you choose.”

It was Kal’s turn to be quiet. As he slowly burned through half the clove, he contemplated the easy way. With a store of cash in the back and the most basic of amenities, he could spend a long time getting fucked up out of his mind and filling his days with nothing but his own interests. It was certainly alluring. Enough so that the entity began to change, shifting into the form it gained access to only a couple of days ago.

The dark, lithe figure in the passenger seat morphed into the short, dryad-like Sylvestris. Gaining this aspect had made the entity more manageable, but some of its vices had clearly been re-compartmentalized. It was the hedonism that was drawing Sylvestris out and Kal was well aware.

“You could do that,” Sylvestris said in his typical chipper demeanor while shifting in his seat to face Kal. “This is your journey, buddy. You get to do it however the hell you want. Hard work is only worth doing if it’s worth doing, y’know? And if it’s not…” He shrugged.

“I don’t like it when you read my thoughts,” Kal responded flatly. “And I’m supposed to be here to build character and find my purpose. I thought you thought I’d done enough fucking around.”

Sylvestris scoffed. “Delphyne thinks so, but Delphyne always has an agenda. I think you should do what you want.”

“Don’t you have an agenda?” Kal took the final hit and tossed the cigarette butt out the window.

“My agenda is to have a good time, but I’m easy to please and a lot qualifies as a good time, so… No, not really.”

Kal gave a dismissive noise and returned his hands to 9 and 3. He was learning how to lean away from Sylvestris’s suggestions despite not yet consciously being aware that they were a mirror for his own desires. “I don’t know. We’ll see. What else do I need to be prepared for?”

“I don’t think you need to be prepared for anything. You’re a well trained machine and you’re good on the fly. Whatever’s coming, you can handle it. It’s time to give yourself a break.”

An annoyed sigh. “Can you put Delphyne back on, please? I really don’t need this right now.”

Sylvestris pouted, but even so, his form was changing back. It had been a rude interruption to begin with and Delphyne was more than ready to resume control of the mouthpiece.

“The house holds secrets,” she continued right as she left off. “It would be a violation to discuss any of it in detail, but it’s an old house built on ancient principles designed to both invoke and evoke magic older than written history. It would be wise to have your wits about you, or at the very least, to be paying attention.”

Kal was beginning to understand even more just how much his life had been leading to what was coming next. If he had been like his cousins, able to actively perform magic, the drive to study wouldn’t have been there. It made him chuckle quietly, imagining Levi and Leora attempting to solve their way through an esoteric puzzle. And then the sting of leaving home began to set in. Kal reached into the glove box, carefully avoiding the space Delphyne occupied, and pulled out a small metal case.

“What? I’m nervous,” he defended, both preemptively and unnecessarily, as he removed one of the hand-rolled joints from the bronze container. “Just a little something to take the edge off.”

Delphyne withheld her comments. “Regrettably, I’ll have matters to attend to when we get there. I’ll depart briefly. I was hoping to leave you in Sylvestris’s care, but… I’m not sure care is the right term at this point.”

“I’m a big boy.” He punctuated the statement with quite the big boy hit off his joint. “I’m sure I can handle myself in an empty house for a while. Besides, he does have a bit of a point. I could use a day or two to just fuck around and get comfortable. It should feel like home, right?”

Delphyne gave a slightly displeased noise, but Kal could feel the amusement as well. “And there’s that gemini moon. Just don’t get distracted for too long, please. A few more days won’t ruin us but we’ve been waiting such a long time for you, Kalev. Even if I have patience, you might find some of the other actors in your fate run short of it.”

Kal inhaled a deep breath, a physical mirroring of the way that statement was sinking in. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said with a quiet seriousness. “I don’t intend on letting you down.”

“Good. Don’t let yourself down either and I think we should do alright.”

**Author's Note:**

> Prologue chapter 2 for the Scribe of Delphi project.
> 
> Weekly updates and more content at Patreon.com/ScribeOfDelphi


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